Should You Consolidate Your Maintenance Contracts?

Maintenance contract consolidation is a hot topic right now. IT departments and data centers are doing everything they can to reduce costs while providing higher service levels. One of the temping ways to do this is by bringing your maintenance contract into a single contract.

Whether or not this is the right move for your organization depends a lot on the specifics. It depends on how much you stand to save versus the risks involved in maintenance contract consolidation.

Here are some general thoughts to get you started analyzing whether consolidated maintenance contracts are right for your company:

• Consolidated maintenance contracts reduce costs. When you contract with a single vendor to provide all of your maintenance solutions, you’re going to pay less than if you had to maintain a dozen or more separate maintenance contracts. If you have a dozen contracts, these costs savings are much deeper and more compelling than if you only have two or three maintenance contracts. Your true cost savings depend, to some degree, on the size of your maintenance needs.

• Consolidated maintenance contracts provide a single point of support contact. This is both good and bad. Having a single point of contact means that you only need ever contact one provider for maintenance needs. In addition, that provider has the big picture when it comes to your organization’s infrastructure, because they deal with many areas of your business. At the same time, a single point of contact is also a single point of failure. If your maintenance contract provider goes under or becomes unreliable, you’re going to have to scramble to get your assets covered.

• Consolidated maintenance contracts trade the big picture for specialization. Your maintenance contract vendor, as noted, has a handle on your overall environment that a typical vendor may not.

However, because that vendor’s expertise is spread out across many technologies, there is always the possibility that they will lack the detailed information necessary to fix certain issues. If you have a tremendously heterogeneous environment, however, this can be more than worth the risk.

Your organization should look into maintenance contract consolidation and make the decision about whether it’s right for you.

Unitiv, Inc., is a professional provider of enterprise IT solutions. Unitiv delivers its services from its headquarters in Alpharetta, Georgia, USA, and its regional office in Iselin, New Jersey, USA. Unitiv provides a strategic approach to its service delivery, focusing on three core components: People, Products, and Processes. The People to advise and support customers. The Products to design and build solutions. The Processes to govern and manage post-implementation operations.